The F35 at NIGHT

Jusgorilla said:
Hi Freya

The F35 actually has a 5K sensor. 5760 x 2160 to be exact. It just delivers a fantastic 1080P image from that.

see: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?318627-F35-Beginners-What-is-the-sensor

and see: http://provideocoalition.com/aadams/story/non_technical_f35_guide/P2
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Thanks so much for this Justin!
I do wonder how these rumours get started sometimes! :)
At least in this instance I get to see!

The F35 RGB-striped sensor design is quite ingenious. It is arranged 2160 photosites vertically and 5760 photosites horizontally--or twice the vertical resolution and three times the horizontal resolution of a normal 1920x1080 HD raster. The photosite columns alternate colors: one column sees only red, the next sees only green, and the last sees only blue, and that sequence repeats horizontally across the surface of the chip.
Click to expand...

That's photosites and not pixels! :)

Of course this is the origin of much argument a few years back in relation to certain very high resolution cameras with bayer sensors but I'm not sure I want to get caught up in that old thing in 2014! ;)

Freya
 
Freya, following that reasoning the F55 doesn't have a 4k sensor either... In an ideal world a final pixel should spring from three or more photosites, but it certainly doesn't have to.
And on another note: 3-chip 1080p CCDs were quite common by the time the F35 rolled out. I remember I had a 3CCD 1080p camcorder in 2008. I shelled out quite a bit of money for that little beauty :)
 
mlysbakken said:
Freya, following that reasoning the F55 doesn't have a 4k sensor either... In an ideal world a final pixel should spring from three or more photosites, but it certainly doesn't have to.
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The Sony F55 eh!? :) I'm glad you chose another Sony camera there! ;) Nice move and I'm duly grateful. :dankk2:
I had no idea I was getting into this stuff when someone said the F35 had a 4K sensor!

Yeah it certainly has been argued, extensively, that certain 4K bayer sensor based cameras weren't actually 4K.
I tried to stay as far away as I could from it all for obvious reasons. ;)

...and yes if we are now accepting that these bayer cameras are 4K (whatever 4K is nowadays but that's another thing) then it does seem fair to me that maybe we should be able to count up all the photosites and treat them as if they were pixels too. Of course the sensor can't output 4K of pixels but maybe it has 4K of quality or something... Dunno

Freya
 
Yeah, let's not argue about it. I have to admit I don't quite follow your reasoning, though, seeing as the F65 would be the only 4k cam in existence by that logic; and that the Alexa would in fact be close to a 720p camera, which I think we both can agree is not the case.
Anyway: Down-ressing is going on within the F35, and that's why the 1080p out of it is so crisp and anti-aliased ;)
 
mlysbakken said:
. I remember I had a 3CCD 1080p camcorder in 2008. I shelled out quite a bit of money for that little beauty :)
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You could be right but I feel skeptical!

I have a HVX200 that records in 1080p ;) and there are of course many people who have been convinced they were shooting 1080p on their canon DSLR's for a very long time now.

What camera do you have in mind?

I think it's an interesting question actually. Maybe there were cameras with 1080p CCD sensors at the very end of the age of CCD.

Freya
 
mlysbakken said:
Anyway: Down-ressing is going on within the F35, and that's why the 1080p out of it is so crisp and anti-aliased ;)
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Ah! No, theres no down-ressing as the sensor only outputs 1080p. Thats the thing, and the difference between photosites and pixels. The photosites are a part of the design of the sensor itself. So more than one photosite can make a pixel.

The lack of aliasing isn't due to any anti-aliasling either but because the camera really does have a 1080p sensor so theres no line skipping or binning or other nastyness going on.

You know I think it might be fairer tho if we DID measure sensors by the number of active photosites rather than the pixels they output. It would make for better comparisons. Surely the quality of colour should count towards the resolution?!

Freya
 
[TABLE="class: lines"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 366"]
Heres the SD9 sensor specs:
[/TD]
[TD="class: value, width: 398"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 366"] Image Sensor (Total)[/TD]
[TD="class: value, width: 398"] 1/6" CCD (560K x 3 pixels)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 366"] Image Sensor (Effective)[/TD]
[TD="class: value, width: 398"] 16:9 -- 520K x 3(Moving Picture/Still Picture)[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

mlysbakken said:
Here you go: http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/HDC-SD9
The internal compression wasn't too kind on the images, though, hehe
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They are only claiming "with 1920x1080-Pixel Recording" on the page. I guess that's better than my old HVX that only does 1440x1080 tho right?! :) I wonder if it does any pixel shift type stuff?

I bet it didn't look that bad! I used to like the old 3chip panasonic mini-dv cameras but then I never saw footage from the memory card models.

Freya
 
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I get your point, and it seems we mostly agree and that this is all nitpicking about words. When I say down-ressing, I mean combining of photosites into pixels as you say, but in the end that is also what happens when you down-res a 4k image from a bayer-camera. We set the resolution of the sensor to 5760 x 2160 just because it's also usual to set the Red MX sensor to 5k. Same amount of photosites.

EDIT: Wow, I never knew that about the camcorder! Might explain some of the mushiness, haha
 
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mlysbakken said:
Yeah, let's not argue about it. I have to admit I don't quite follow your reasoning, though, seeing as the F65 would be the only 4k cam in existence by that logic; and that the Alexa would in fact be close to a 720p camera, which I think we both can agree is not the case.
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The F65 was even marketed as being "True 4K" at one point!

A lot of stuff like you are suggesting was definitely said back in the day.
People also got upset about comparisons to film scanned at 4K which would of course be at full RGB whereas a 4K bayer based camera isn't.
It all got very heated, people were banned from forums all kinds of stuff went on!

I think at that point in time some people were kind of fanatical about certain cameras which seems to have dropped off a lot these days so maybe it's okay to discuss this kind of thing again! :)

Freya
 
mlysbakken said:
I get your point, and it seems we mostly agree and that this is all nitpicking about words. When I say down-ressing, I mean combining of photosites into pixels as you say, but in the end that is also what happens when you down-res a 4k image from a bayer-camera. We set the resolution of the sensor to 5760 x 2160 just because it's also usual to set the Red MX sensor to 5k. Same amount of photosites.

EDIT: Wow, I never knew that about the camcorder! Might explain some of the mushiness, haha
Click to expand...

Not meaning to be nit picky so hope I'm not seeming too much like that, it's actually a bit of a problem with this kind of thing as people buy cameras with specs in mind but the meaning of things shift and things get misleading.

It's like that FULL HD recording camera that Panasonic marketed or the new UHD version of 4K which isn't actually 4K.

Freya
 
I just want to point out that Sony were making 3-chip 1080P CCD cameras in the 90s, and there was a 4K CCD camera in the "RED" sense from the early/mid 00s - called the DALSA ORIGIN. Now defunct, but it did exist.

The F35 came out in 2008 but the Panavision Genesis (same chip) has been around since 2005. What has mainly changed is affordability - the move to CMOS sensors has been largely cost driven, there are other benefits, but the biggie is always going to be money.
 
Interesting discussion. So is the F35 sensor 4K or not? There seems to be more people saying it is than the other way around. I guess it depends if you considered the Red One 4k or not. But I remember Panavision saying that if the Red One was 4k the Genesis was too.

Going back on topic, night shooting, I watched the imaginarium of doctor parnassus on blu-ray on my plasma and I have to say it is beautiful. 35mm is still king. I don't care what digital proponents say. I was actually surprised that the night footage, even under available light looked very clean. They didn't have a big budget so they shot a lot around London with just available light. You can actually notice it. But it was quite clean for being ISO 500 35mm film. Cleaner than what I have seen from the F35 for example. I know the F35 is ISO 450 and 50 makes a little difference. But still, I was impressed with how clean it looked and how much it resolved in the dark. The shadow detail also looked better.

But the F35 is the king of digital for sure! I watched Skyfall also and it is full of ugly yellow highlights and ugly blown out highlights. I have not seen such ugly handling of highlights in F35 footage yet. For low light the Alexa wins. But daylight and overall mojo is F35 all day.

I'm now debating if there is any sense in buying a F35 with the HDCAM SR recorder. Not sure there are still any advantages in using the deck at this point. I know it will do 12 bit 444 50p. But if the 7Q would be updated and soon the HDCAM SR deck would probably lose any sense left right?
 
The HDCAM SR is still the only way to do ramping, which I guess could be cool to have. It's also one of the few recorders with which you can start recording from the on-camera button. But it's bulky and heavy, not to mention that the tape workflow is slower that with SSDs.
 
the HDCAM SR deck will do ramping, 4:4:4 50p with the proper cards installed.

It will NOT do 12-bit. Some other recorders WILL (eg. Codex Onboard). The HDCAM SR cannot because 12-bit is not in the SR tape spec. Simple as.

Also SJX I think you will find if you put an F35 and a film camera next to each other at night, under the same conditions, the F35 would be considerably cleaner. Not sure where you are based but London is brighter than you imagine it would be, even at night.

I have seen plenty of things I would have sworn were shot 16mm and were actually digital, and things that I would have said were digital which were actually film. It really depends.It kinda proves the camera is a really small part of your "look" in the overall scheme of things.

Putting a pro-mist in front of a camera is going to make a bigger difference to the picture than changing from F35 to ALEXA, IMHO.
 
JMtheDP said:
Also SJX I think you will find if you put an F35 and a film camera next to each other at night, under the same conditions, the F35 would be considerably cleaner.
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Well if you watch the 2011 Zacuto shootout, Kodak 5219 which is only ISO 500 has much better shadow detail and actually sees more in the dark than the F35 at ISO 640, and 5219 looks considerably cleaner!

I think they used 5218 on parnassus which is supposed to be even finer grained.

The F35 is just not a low light camera at all. In the signal to noise ratio test it only beats film. But even film in practice looked better in low light.

But in the overexposure tests, oh my. Film and the F35 were the best with the Alexa and RED One MX next. The rest looked really bad, unusable including the F3. But the F35 looked the closest to film here. :thumbsup:

In the resolution test the F35 shines again. While the F3 came out like a true 1080p camera, the F35 resolved much higher at around 1360. Not surprisingly as the F35 looks considerably sharper than the F3. So I guess you could say the F35 definitely resolves beyond HD after all. Probably because the "4K" sensor.
 
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I have seen the Zacuto shootout, although it was some time ago. I also take anything online with a massive grain of salt - we are talking 500mbps video signals compressed down to about 5mbps - strange things can happen.

Ultimately I would be happy using either 35mm or the F35 in similar situations and can't think of anything that only one of them can do. A point that has been mentioned about a zillion times, but rings very true.

The F35 is one of very, very few digital cameras I know with a noise pattern that feels remotely like film grain.
 
Reading around about the F35 and going through some old press of the time I found a press release that says: "F35 cameras have been updated to the new Cine-EI settings. This allows for the camera to be set at EI 450/640/800 and 1000 at full 800% output allowing for exposures at 1000EI with a very limited noise floor meaning clean images at fast exposures." I guess limited noise floor is a subjective thing. But are there footage examples online showing this feature?
Do all F35s come with it? I would say most owners would have updated. Or did anybody get one without this upgrade?
 
SJX

I posted a thread about this a few weeks ago. Pretty much the EI does not change the ASA. It is used to help camera dept when rating the camera at a certain speed, and then pushed to a correct exposure in post.

It was included in the same firmware upgrade as the recent 12bit feature back in 2011. I would conclude it was just a bunch of marketing due to the Alexa gaining popularity.
 
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